My friends!
I come bearing a limbic system retraining update. It's been about ten weeks since I started training, and I continue to be encouraged by my progress. The last few weeks have been particularly encouraging since I've had several pockets during which I can feel the lights in my body flicker on as my brain begins to remember how to function like a normal, healthy brain. During these pockets, I'm able to be up, engaging people and activity, more often and more easily.
Here are a few other encouraging signs of progress:
1. I'm not constantly in fight-or-flight mode anymore and am generally much calmer than I have been in ages. Things that used to drench my body in adrenaline and trigger a set of crazy physical challenges — like the sound of my phone buzzing, or bright lights, or artificial smells — are affecting me less and less.
As my healing brain creates more pockets of calm, it is able to divert the energy it used to need to maintain a constant state of fight-or-flight to healing the rest of my body. I expect that my brain will eventually slide completely out of fight-or-flight mode so my body can use every last bit of its energy to heal.
2. I've continued to work on adding foods back to my diet, and I've successfully re-integrated almost all fresh fruits.
I'm especially happy to be eating bananas...
....and, in the non-fruit category: POTATO CHIPS! I'm thankful to have such a calorie-heavy source of food. For awhile there, I had to drink sparkling water if I wanted to feel full, but now, I just pull out a bag of tater chips.
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| I accidentally ate an entire bag of potato Chips on Sunday. Also on Monday. Also on Tuesday. |
3. For years I tried to remember what it felt like to be in my body before all of these challenges started, but whenever I inserted myself into a happy memory, my physical challenges would invade and change the memory. Remembering my old life often made me feel like I was watching a movie about someone else's life — a character with whom I couldn't identify at all.
But over the last ten days I've been repeatedly hit with snippets of memories from my early twenties, and in those moments my brain REMEMBERS what it felt like to be in my body back then. I've remembered what it felt like to lift weights in Austria, camp in the Italian countryside, and go swing dancing in Pasadena. As far as I understand, this remembering is a sign that my hippocampus — a key part of the limbic system — is coming back online after many years of malfunctioning.
It's so exciting and encouraging to see these signs of brain, and subsequent body, change. The goal is to do this program for a minimum of six months, but my intuition and research suggest I need to be doing this for a whole year, so that's what I'm committing to. I'm feeling more and more confident that at this time next year, I'll be singing a whole new song.
If you're new to my blog and want to read more about limbic system retraining, click here.
Thanks for praying with me as I train, my friends.
I'm praying and cheering for you,
Sarah
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